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Workrest – The Platform Transforming Crew Management

We caught up with Tim Fletcher, Founder & CEO of Workrest this month. Having worked on superyachts for 5 years, Tim’s experienced first-hand the frustrations captains and crew face when logging hours of rest and monitoring compliance.

Whilst I’m sure you’re familiar with the process, it’s worth highlighting the inefficiencies of a process that’s a legal requirement for everyone working at sea (on a commercially registered vessel) and one which led Tim to create Workrest.

Each month crew members are required to manually fill out a printed spreadsheet with the hours that they worked and rested throughout the month.  But as most crew members will tell you, working at sea is incredibly demanding and tasks like filling out your hours of rest spreadsheet unfortunately get left until the last minute, by which time the chief officer is chasing you for them.

“It wasn’t so much the process we disliked, we all knew we had to do it, but the fact that we had to manually mark down our hours on a paper spreadsheet with a pen, that got most people frustrated. It seemed crazy to do it this way. And who remembers the hours they worked over 3 weeks ago?”

And it didn’t get any easier for those on the bridge in charge of chasing everyone onboard to fill out their spreadsheets.  They would have to calculate each crew member’s hours of rest compliance for the month, making note of non-compliant days and trying to ensure adequate rest was given in response (a task made harder by the fact that they weren’t aware of the non-compliance until weeks after the fact). Tim was convinced there was a better way!

2 years and thousands of hours in development later, Tim launched Workrest.

The concept was simple.

  • Provide the crew with an intuitive method of logging their hours on any device
  • Give captains and heads of department a simplified method for approving timesheets and instant visibility of “hours of rest” compliance.

Tim explains “we wanted to automate processes where possible and dramatically reduce the time vessels waste on their hours of rest process.”  With the platform made up of two parts, it combines a web and mobile app for crew to log hours in both on and offline modes, and a vessel dashboard for captains to track compliance and digitally sign off and export timesheets.  It takes vessels less than 2 minutes to set up, using only what they already have available on board.  Crew members are saving, on average, between 30 to 50 minutes each month compared with their old hours of rest solution.

As for the what’s next, Tim told me “we’ve got some great products in the pipeline. Short term, we’re launching an all-in-one leave management platform designed to let vessel managers know exactly who’s off, coming back, going soon and how much leave they’ve accrued with one click.  In the long term we’re very much led by our customer feedback. We have over 4000 people using Workrest each month and we look to them to tell us what they need to make their life simpler.”

For more information or to download the app for free, simply visit workrest.co